


Riposo

by OrionLady



Series: Figlio Mozzato [9]
Category: Flashpoint (TV)
Genre: Epic Friendship, Families of Choice, Friendship, Gen, Growing Up, Hope, Life against Death, Parkinson's, Peace, Pregnancy, Series title finally fulfilled and explained, Team as Family, Terminal Illnesses
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-28
Updated: 2019-09-28
Packaged: 2020-10-30 04:02:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,910
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20808203
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OrionLady/pseuds/OrionLady
Summary: In Wordy's final hours, the team gathers around his bedside. And after a heart-to-heart, Greg realizes the truth of what it means to have found a resting place for one's soul.A hero's reward is peace.





	Riposo

**Author's Note:**

> This is set about five or six years after the end of the series. Thinking of Wordy's final days makes me cry, so I had to postlude this series with a story of peace and hope for the future, life contrasted against his death.

'I have seen all I care to see  
Of this world, it has no more for me.  
I need the call for giving peace  
That only comes from my family:  
I wanna go home.'

"Home" ~ Aron Wright

“…And after the fire the sound of a low whisper.” ~ 1 Kings 19:12

The heart monitor beeps significantly slower than it did six weeks ago.

None of the four people around the bed show this on their faces or even pay it any mind.

They sit in a messy lump, one perched on the bed playing footsy with its occupant. One long legged sniper sprawled across a chair. The other next to his wife on the opposite side of the bed.

The last, hovering near the back of this cozy scene, standing with a perfect view of once-bright blue eyes.

Everyone says their goodbyes, laughing over dumb stories and the old days. Everybody’s crying but nobody cares. It’s a glaring exhibition of how far they’ve come in twelve years, that they can be this vulnerable and feel safe.

They’re long past any self-consciousness.

This is a definition that would be tempting to sum up in the word _family_. And it was, once.

It’s something more now, something of the soldiers in their foxholes in World War II, something tired, something alive and growing all the time.

It’s home.

Only one person, one jewel in this coronet of six, is missing. 

Greg prods Ed’s foot, keeping his voice low to not disturb the animated story Jules and Wordy are telling Sam.

“Did you see where he…?”

Ed straightens in his chair, the stain of a peaceful smile still playing at the corners of his lips. “I think he needed a minute. Out back.”

He misses nothing, even now. Always one eye on what’s coming and one on his team.

Greg grips Wordy’s ankle over Jules. “Be right back.”

Wordy wheezes around a cannula. “Don’t…keep a guy…hanging.”

Laughing, Greg winks. “Wouldn’t dare. At ease, friend.”

He closes the door behind him, going soft at Shelley asleep in one of the waiting room chairs. She looks strangely calm, no tear tracks. She’s had as much time as them all to process reality and yet somehow she’s handling it far better.

One’s home is a funny thing sometimes.

“Hey, sarg.” Winnie shuffles to her feet, despite Greg’s protests. “He darted out a few minutes ago.”

Greg huffs, fond. He hugs her around the swollen belly between them. “I’m on it.”

He rides the hospital elevator down, thankful his leg doesn’t pain him on sunny days like this. Said sun is setting over Lake Ontario when he hobbles down the garden path to a little park at the back of the campus.

Recovering patients wander through the flowers, some with walkers, other supported by nurses.

And at the very end is a wooden swing, the kind on porches or cottages.

The figure sitting on it isn’t really rocking, just toeing the grass a little, so that he bobs. He’s older. More grey in his hair than all those years ago, just tiny streaks that make Greg’s stomach a puddle.

The boy in him is harder to see now, all a man’s profile. Confident jaw and shoulders squared.

Greg sits down, squinting a little against the sun. With his foot, he rocks the swing harder. Just to see the man next to him forced to re balance—a flash of teenager peeks out at the gawky action.

Spike grins. Greg never could fool him.

“We miss you up there.”

Spike nods. “I’m coming to say my…to see him. In a second.”

Greg hums in his chest, and waits with his boy for many seconds, in fact. The Lake is farther away, hard to hear except for faint crashes of waves in this hazy, windy day.

A wedding ring sits on Spike’s finger. His fan lines are deeper, hands decorated with ropy lines from new injuries. Hair doesn’t grow back around the bullet scar along his scalp so well anymore.

But Greg looks at him and here too he is _home_.

He’s so overcome with emotion all of a sudden that he has to close his mouth to halt the shaky, popping exhale.

“I wish I’d gotten to see you grow up,” he blurts.

Spike’s eyes, Greg finds out in that moment, haven’t changed one bit. They spark, light up with the rays of a thousand, melon orange stars. Fireflies around a dying bonfire. A million memories.

“Taught you how to ride a bike,” Greg rambles on. “Seen you scrape your knee and go to high school for the first day, take a girl on a date, learn how to tie a tie.”

“See me crash my first car.”

“Really?” Greg’s brows shoot up.

“No.” Spike laughs, a quiet sound. “I was never allowed to drive enough to try. It’s why I went crazy at the Academy. I certified tactical to get it out of my system.”

Greg smiles too. “Of course you did.”

“You did though,” says Spike, even quieter. “Raise me. Saw me through terrible battles, ones you probably didn’t even know about.”

“We did,” Greg says simply.

Spike’s eyes are half lidded and fond to match Greg’s, side eyeing the man. “You made me into what I am, you know.”

Greg shakes his head. “We just got you to the finish line.”

Spike doesn’t let him get away with that. “No, you shaped all the raw bits clamoring around in there.” Spike taps his head, then his chest. “Didn’t know how to use it in love very well until I met you.”

To release some of the energy, Spike spells off pushing at the ground with his foot. They swing back and forth. The chains continue their muted squeal.

“You’re wrong on one account.” Greg takes Spike’s hand. “You didn’t need any help learning how to use that big heart. It had so much love to give, even when you’d been shown so little.”

Spike shakes his head with a smile that somehow reminds Greg of Wordy. This boy has pieces of all of them, he supposes. The result of years being their youngest. “My definition of love was wrong, though. You corrected it. Straightened all the bent pieces.”

Greg hears a singing under his feet. A resonant note echoed by the waves and the clouds and stars about to come out and the heart punching away inside his sternum. “So did you. We’re all better people for knowing you, Spike.”

Then Spike is humming, a pleased, shy sound.

Greg wonders if he’ll ever get used to having the wine skin of his heart stretched to hold all this affection, increased over and over again, every day. Just when he thinks it’s stretched to capacity, he finds room for a little more.

He’s weak at the knees with it all.

The wind picks up and Spike’s hair flutters. Those lashes, always too long for his face, whisk at his cheeks when he blinks.

“You cold, Greg?” asks Spike, since Greg finally got the whole team to stop using the title a few years back. He’d celebrated _that _victory for months. “The wind’s getting chilly.”

Greg isn’t, but he lets Spike shuck his wind breaker and drape it over Greg. Just for an excuse to catch Spike in a close hold. He expects a squawk or half hearted complaint.

But Spike curls into the arm around his shoulders and neck. Tucks himself there with a slight flush in his cheeks, trying to steal back some of the boy inside the man. It works, if only for a flash in the pan, when Greg ruffles the ever-messy locks and then kisses them.

“You’re going to be a father,” says Greg, still awed by this fact. He releases Spike _just_ enough to let the man peer up at him. “I’ll never get over that.”

Spike pokes Greg in the stomach. “Well, you’d better, paparino. We’re naming him after you.”

Time _stops._

Greg’s throat closes over. Actual, honest-to-God chokes up, all the way to the back of his eyes. His mouth fills with something white and buttery and saturated. It’s the woven shapes in his chest, he knows, the ones tailor made for this boy. They’re surging up in hope and joy and other emotions he doesn’t know the name to yet—

But he’ll have plenty of time to learn.

Like Adam, naming animals in the Garden, he can’t wait to explore the path set before him, where all this love will go. It’s already taken them so far.

“What?” is Greg’s profound reaction when his brain resumes functioning.

Spike’s eyes spark again, delighted. He sits up so his head is on Greg’s shoulder. “Yeah. Winnie and I talked about it—Miguel Gregson Scarlatti.”

“You’re having a _boy_?” Greg still isn’t beyond this sentence.

“Don’t spoil the surprise.” Spike’s eyes laugh along with his mouth now. “We had to honour you somehow.”

Greg wants to say, ‘_No, you didn’t_.’ But he knows better. He knows he’s helpless, ecstatic and helpless, his only choice left to ride the wave.

“Congratulations,” he breathes. For the umpteenth time.

This time is different. This time it’s not a chirpy, jubilant word. This time it’s a prayer, whispered into the face of his child, his legacy. Greg still can’t believe he lived long enough to see it.

Then he says, to banish the brightness from both their eyes—“Your kid is going to be so confused, with a name like that.”

Spike pushes off Greg with a groan. “You might be right: half Cuban mother, Italian father, and an Irish grandfather.”

Spike laughs at this mental image but Greg’s breath catches.

_Grandfather_.

Another new word.

“Ed’s going to be godfather,” says Spike, hushed again. “Don’t tell him that either.”

“Don’t you worry. My lips are sealed.”

“No they’re not.”

Greg tastes salt and his smile broadens. “No. Not a chance.”

Spike leans back with an ‘ugh’ sound, but he’s glowing. Greg can practically _see _the imagined memories of Winnie and their new son floating in Spike’s head, ready to be made.

“Do you remember that case with the planted bomb? In the drug cartel’s basement?”

“Sure.” Spike cants his head. “What about it?”

“What…what exactly did the cartel leader say to you, when he spoke to you in Italian?”

It’s an odd question for right now but Greg suddenly has to know. It’s at once important, though even he isn’t sure why.

Spike doesn’t look like he has to cast his mind very far back, which telegraphs that he’s probably thought it over many times since that day. “He called me pet names, mostly, meant to demean.”

Then he looks at Greg. Greg doesn’t understand why, the reason for that burning gaze, blistered with love.

“Spike?”

“He taunted me, mainly he kept saying I was the team’s _figlio mozzato_.”

Greg has learned a lot of the language since meeting Spike, but he doesn’t recognize the second word at all.

Spike leans in, expression proud in a way Greg doesn’t understand. “It’s a term of disgrace in Italian families. _Figlio mozzato_—severed son. Cut off from his people _by_ those people.”

Then he’s grinning, the last of the day’s sun lighting up Spike’s eyes and their topaz shimmer.

“He was trying to make you feel alone,” Greg supposes out loud. “That you had no backup, at his mercy. Probably also implying that we’d abandon you, which is ridiculous.”

Spike’s eyes are up now, face down, and his grin is turning humorous. It dawns on Greg that he’s missing something.

“Greg,” says Spike, oozing warmth, “mozzato has two meanings. He didn’t get that at all.”

“Oh.” Greg watches the bubbling in Spike’s face and feels it fizz inside his own chest, in answer. “And the other?”

Spike hums again. He points to waves in the distance. “It’s a word for docking a boat. Shortening something, an excess of motion, because it is at _rest_.”

“Oh,” says Greg again, hoarse this time.

Spike squeezes their hands. “He was right in calling me that particular name. Cut off from my people only to gain you. To be at rest.”

“I think we gained the most here,” Greg argues.

He looks over just in time to catch the indulgent, cheeky smirk Spike throws him. “Whatever you say, boss.”

“Don’t you start with me.”

Spike laughs.

Peace scents the air around them, swirling in generous eddies over their heads, a strumming inside their spirits, resounding with each other in harmonies Greg isn’t sure how he ever lived without.

“You know,” says Spike. He has one arm thrown over his belly, like they’ve just eaten a big meal. “I think we’re going to be okay.”

“Yeah?” Greg tightens his hold around the bony shoulders. “You just might be on to something, _tesoro_. Maybe there’s a future for you after all.”

“You think so?” Spike’s eyes twinkle. “Because there’s this job as a tech specialist with the SRU I really love.”

Greg tries to dim his smile, hiding the teeth showing, but it only serves to tighten his cheeks. “I’ll put in a good word for you.”

They meander up to Wordy’s room in a slow, easy wander. Dusk has truly fallen when Spike kisses his wife—“Miguel is kicking, Greg! Come feel!”—and they make it to the hospital room.

The team is still there, though Ed’s nodded off in the chair and Jules is playing a mostly one-sided game of cards with Wordy. Sam has his arms folded, eyes wet, just watching over them all.

Spike nods at Sam when the man clasps his arm.

“He’s in and out of sleep,” the younger sniper whispers.

But Wordy must sense this change in the room’s occupants, for his eyes pop open when Spike enters. 

He’s in motion instantly with a strength that shocks the others. Most of his body is ‘offline,’ unresponsive to commands, but he flutters one hand off the mattress in a Herculean display of determination.

Spike meets him halfway, clasping the weak fingers.

“Hey…squirt.”

“Hey.” Spike’s grin hasn’t left at all. “Is this where the party’s at?”

“Can’t…start without…you.”

Spike hiccups a bit at that one, and a hand rubs circles on his back. A larger one smooths the wind-tossed hair.

Somehow they draw together like the night Wordy confessed his diagnosis, a giant, huddled ring of flesh, bone, fears, and hope.

Spike and Wordy are at the epicenter.

Greg realizes they’ve all linked without noticing, touching shoulders and backs and wrists and arms sneaking around waists and heads tipped together.

It casts a protective shadow over their friend. They must be a sight, beloved faces haloed by a fading sun and emerging stars.

“We’re going to be okay,” Spike repeats, to Wordy. “No matter what happens.”

Wordy smiles, really _beams_ for the first time since the start of his hospice stay. It has a visible reaction on all of them, their bodies jolting.

_Leave it to Spike._

Spike lowers to a murmur but it’s no less firm and certain. He pumps their combined hands. “You got that, Wordy? You don’t have to worry anymore. We’re going to be okay.”

A ripple passes through Wordy’s sea blue eyes, something too powerful to name and desperate all at once.

Wordy simply looks at Spike for a minute. Not a stare, not blank, but studying the youthful, wise features and hidden scars.

He bobs his chin. Spike understands, bending down to hear better. Greg’s hand, which has landed on the man’s shoulder at some point, follows this motion.

“I’ll…always worry about you—all of you—until I take my last breath.”

Spike’s eyes go huge, floored by that.

Wordy chuckles at the reaction, and the sound is so familiar, such a dusty sensation from days gone by that it starts Ed up, then Greg. Their laughter is a constellation of bubbles, popping in every corner.

Collectively, in one unison action, all six take a breath. They’ve synchronized with Wordy’s breathing tube.

It’s a heady sensation, pressed in so close. The room becomes a capsule, shooting them up…up, further, further away. Away from terminal sentences and bombs and bullets and the worst life can throw at them.

And then they’re up among the stars, among the singing, vibrating planets and comets. Stardust swirls through their ribs, their teeth, the aching hollow hidden behind their lungs.

Wordy kisses Jules’ hand. In a ripple effect, she’s rubbing Spike’s shoulder, who leans into Sam, who bumps heads with Ed, who squeezes Greg’s wrist. Their song reaches a crescendo that shakes the room.

Greg’s chest gives one almighty tug.

The woven shapes get tangled together around the threads, so tied with every other person standing here that he can’t figure out where one starts and the other ends. Spike sighs, a content sound, and all the threads quiver.

For that is the truth no one ever grasps:

They are just one giant ball of diaphanous silver yarn, not six individual ones. They may part for a time but it’s spooled out, to be reeled back when the time is right.

The silver threads are plucked, a song Greg has been singing years before he ever knew the words.

“You can rest,” says Spike. He looks at each face in turn, their dying laughter and wiped eyes. The final cadence thrums between their beating hearts. “We all can.”

**Author's Note:**

> Written July 2019.


End file.
